Editor's Choice

Cleveland burdens travelers with taxes more than most cities

Cleveland doesn't make things easy on travelers' wallets, according to a new study by the GBTA Foundation, the education and research arm of the Global Business Travel Association.
The organization ranks the top U.S. 50 markets in two ways:

By overall travel tax burden, including general sales tax and what the GBTA Foundation calls “discriminatory travel taxes,” and

By the “discriminatory travel tax burden,” excluding general sales taxes to count only taxes that target car rentals, hotel stays and meals. These taxes are targeted at travelers or travel-related areas and go above the general sales tax.
The GBTA Foundation says discriminatory travel taxes and fees enacted on travel-related services “impose an average increased cost on visitors of 57% over general sales tax.”
In the overall travel tax burden, the study finds, Cleveland has the seventh-highest costs, with combined single-day travel taxes of $34.22. Chicago is the highest, at $40.31, while Fort Lauderdale, Fla., is the cheapest, at $22.21.
Similarly, Cleveland is ranked as the eighth-highest city for discriminatory travel taxes, costing visitors $14.79 per day on top of general sales taxes. In this ranking, Portland, Ore., is the worst, at $22.45, and Burbank, Calif., is the cheapest, at just $1.81. (All the cities that rank low in discriminatory travel taxes are in California and Florida, which makes sense, because those states are hugely reliant on tourists to power their economies.)
As the GBTA Foundation sees it, cities with a higher tax burden are taking a big risk.
“Business travel is a key driver of economic growth, but overly burdensome taxes on business travel can often do more harm than good, especially when those taxes unfairly target visitors,” said Joseph Bates, GBTA Foundation senior director of research, in a statement. “Cities and states must think carefully about the sales that local businesses will lose because of the higher costs that travel taxes impose.”

Having their say

The Washington Post examines the political surrogates game and finds a couple of the most polished practitioners are from Ohio.
“One of the biggest don'ts is, if you don't know something, don't talk about it,” says Ken Blackwell, a Mitt Romney surrogate and former Cincinnati mayor, Ohio secretary of state and U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission.
Mr. Blackwell has been doing this for a long time — he was a Ronald Reagan surrogate back in 1984 — and he knows what he's doing. Per The Post:
Blackwell chatted while driving to a Romney rally on a day when he also was scheduled to appear on Neil Cavuto's Fox News program. He can see the questions coming before they're asked. “I'm sure Cavuto is going to ask me about Ohio as a battleground state,” he said. Blackwell was intent on making sure he also steered the conversation to what his contacts in Romney's campaign told him would be the theme of the day: “The economy.”
On their good days, the newspaper says, “surrogates grind the candidate's message into the public consciousness.”
Although he's relatively new to the game, U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, a Cincinnati Republican, has shown great discipline, “pounding Obama over his 'you didn't build that' comment,” The Post notes.
The story does not mention another Ohioan, former Gov. Ted Strickland, who seems to have become a fairly effective advocate for the Obama campaign.

This and that

Creativity needed: The ranks of people who don't use banks are growing, Bloomberg reports, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has a message for banks about poorer Americans: They could be good customers, and their numbers are growing.
“U.S. households without bank accounts grew by 821,000 from 2009 to 2011, pushing the so-called unbanked population to 8.2 percent of the nation's total, according to the news service, citing the FDIC's National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households. “The result is that about 17 million adults manage their finances without checking or savings accounts at insured institutions, many of them relying instead on non-banks such as payday lenders and check-cashing stores.”
The FDIC last year ran a pilot program called “Model Safe Accounts” designed to explore the feasibility of checking and savings accounts designed for underserved populations, Bloomberg notes. Cleveland-based KeyCorp was one of nine banks that participated.
“Reduced to the bare bones of a checking account -- it has no paper checks -- the new product has been successful, said David Bowen, a director at KeyBank for community bank product management and specialty programs,” Bloomberg reports.
“You cannot overdraft the account,” Mr. Bowen said this week at an FDIC conference. “And because you don't have checks, there's no way to bounce an item.”
Without those features, there is a very low risk that the bank would lose money. So, “for all intents and purposes, it's free,” Mr. Bowen said.
Money is tight: Ohio is a closely contested state in the presidential election — you might have heard a bit about that, right? — but it's not a hotbed of big-ticket fundraising for President Barack Obama.
The New York Times compiles a list of the president's top “bundlers” — people who gather checks from friends and business associates — and finds few Ohioans are on it.
Topping the list among Ohio bundlers for the president are Ron and Deborah Ratner of Shaker Heights, who have raised $169,250 for the president this cycle. Mr. Ratner is executive vice president of Forest City Enterprises Inc.
Richard and Doreen Cahoon of Cleveland Heights have helped raise $153,890. Mr. Cahoon is a partner emeritus of Dealer Tire.
Finally, Jones Day attorney Robert Rawson of Shaker Heights has helped raise $86,000 for the president.
The top Obama bundler is Miami-based writer Andrew Tobias, at $4.08 million. His prominence in this area makes sense, in a way, because most of Mr. Tobias' writing is about money and investing.
He has enough to do: At the Techonomy Detroit conference at Wayne State University, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, during a discussion on “the city as inspiration,” confessed to a major aspiration: He'd like one day to be mayor of New York City.
Also on the panel, according to this Forbes.com story, was Dan Gilbert, chairman of Rock Ventures and Quicken Loans, and majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Mr. Gilbert said flatly that he is “not interested” in being mayor of Detroit.